‘Loser Dance’: The Harlem Shake With Chinese Characteristics

Unlike the Gangnam Style parody phenomenon of 2012, which seemed to really gain traction in China only after it had already laid waste to the rest of the global Internet, the latest viral music video craze has managed to catch on with the world’s largest population of Internet users not long after conquering banned-in-China YouTube.

Youku

A screenshot from Chinese video site Youku shows one of the Harlem Shake videos that have started to spread on the Chinese Internet.

The Harlem Shake – or Halin Yao, as it’s known in Mandarin – is based on an electronic dance track of the same name by Brooklyn-based producer Baauer. Each roughly 30-second video begins with a single person dancing alone to the music (typically wearing a helmet) while others in the room sit idly by. Then the bass line drops, the video cuts and suddenly everyone in the room is convulsing, shimmying or thrusting suggestively, often with the help of props.

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Cultural critics have attributed the success of the meme, which has nothing to do with the original Harlem Shake (a dance born New York in the 1980s and popularized in the early 2000s), to its being short, catchy, and easy to produce and customize.

The formulaic simplicity of producing a Harlem Shake video has obvious appeal in a country that, by its own admission, struggles with creativity. But the meme also appears to have tapped into China’s diaosi (or loser) mentality – a self-effacing rejection of rigid social norms and expectations that has caught on among Chinese youth in recent years.

One of the more popular Chinese takes on the Harlem Shake, produced by employees of Shanghai-based online men’s magazine Neonan, has been widely advertised on Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging platform as the work of “insane losers.” Many have simply taken to calling the Harlem Shake the “loser dance.”

That’s not to say slacker twenty-somethings have a monopoly on the genre. In this version, two grannies get in on the act:

A number of critics have suggested the Harlem Shake meme might already be dead in the U.S., though China could very well inject some new life into it. Searches reveal more than a dozen Chinese Harlem Shake videos so far, including this one filmed in a pharmacy.

For those who prefer to get all their shaking in one place, here’s a compilation:

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